


Learning To Fly, Reprise

by Grundy



Series: Daughters of Celebrían [9]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV), The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen, Summers logic, who says elves can't fly?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-21
Updated: 2018-12-20
Packaged: 2019-09-23 22:26:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17088896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Grundy/pseuds/Grundy
Summary: Anairon should have known better to say something like "elves can't fly" to Tindomiel. Even if there was so much family history suggesting it was true...





	Learning To Fly, Reprise

“Are you _sure_ about this?” Anairon asked nervously.

Tindomiel could tell he was trying very hard not to show fear – a combination of ‘they call Findekano _the Valiant_ , I have to at least look like I’m not about to pee myself about something that doesn’t even involve violence’ and not wanting to look like a wimp in her eyes.

Fifteen years in Aman had wrought a considerable change in her kinsman and now best friend, but he was still not naturally bold. Not that Tindomiel was all that bothered by it – she rolled with Anairon as he was, even if as he was meant often worried about living up to the long dead older siblings he’d never met and his older brother (her great-great-grandfather) Turukano, who he didn’t know all that well.

Tindomiel didn’t actually give a rat’s patootie if Anairon was anything like his big brothers, although she did occasionally (and absolutely silently) regret he wasn’t a tiny bit more like his big sister, because Aunt Irissë sounded _interesting_. He’s her best friend, and she told him that fairly often, because he’d never had one before any more than she had – he’d been as on his own in Tirion as she’d been in Imladris when it came to like-aged elves to hang out with.

And he was a good sport – even if he wasn’t as confident about her plans as she was, he at least tried them out. He was just a lot more nervous than usual about this one.

It probably didn’t help that Anairon had also heard a lot more stories of disaster about what they were trying. ‘Elves cannot fly’ had been drilled into his head since he was young. Apparently there was _quite_ the family history in the area of flight, all of it unsuccessful. _Grandmother_ had actually been involved in the closest thing to actual flight, in which Amras had sorta flown for a few seconds before things went wrong and he broke a rib crashing into side of the house. (Stories like this are one of the fringe benefits of being in Aman, where there are tons of relatives around to tell them.)

But it wasn’t like the joint attempt by the Fëanorion twins, Aunt Irissë, and Grandmother had been the only incident.

Uncle Findekano was agreed to be the first in the family to have tried. None of Finwë’s children had taken an interest in flight; among Uncle Butthead’s brood, Grandpa Maedhros had apparently been unnaturally well-behaved from the moment of his begetting and unsurprisingly Grandpa Makalaurë had been more interested in _singing_ with the birds than _flying_ with them.

Uncle Findekano had tried flight pretty early on, at the tender age of eight, which was pretty much the elven equivalent of a pre-schooler. There had been no planning whatsoever, it had been a spur of the moment thing – he’d hopped up on one of the long tables in the royal palace while his parents were there for a family get-together and gotten a bit of a running start before trying to flap his arms when he got to the end of the table. He ended up on the floor and to hear Grandfather Nolo tell it, was lucky he hadn’t been smothered by the sheer number of worried female relatives when his mother, both grandmothers and all his aunts all rushed over to make sure he was ok.

Even My Dog Thinks I Make Bad Choices had been the next one to try, and while he was both older and stupider, he still managed to not do himself any serious injury trying to keep up with the birds taking flight from the garden wall in Formenos. She’d heard that one from Gran Lindë, who hadn’t been married to Grandpa Makalaurë yet so hadn’t been there to see it, but had heard about it later. (Unlike Grandma Nerdanel, Gran Lindë could tell the story without getting all choked up thinking about the dumbass.)

Then there had been Joint Attempt #1, in which Butthead Junior had teamed up with Grandpop Turukano and Uncle Finrod. They’d been in their twenties, so more like pre-teens than their older brother/cousins had been. The three of them had made laughably bad ‘wings’ out of wood – and not a light wood like balsa or anything, but proper hardwood, like something you’d make furniture out of. The resulting wings had not aerodynamic in even the tiniest little bit. The three of them had jumped out of a fair sized tree in the royal gardens, and ended up with two broken arms (Butthead Jr. and Uncle Finrod) and a broken leg (Grandpop Turukano) for their efforts.

Joint Attempt #2 had been the most seriously planned, and featured actual research on the part of the four conspirators. Grandmother, Aunt Irissë, Amras, and Amrod had talked to various older relatives and made an effort to learn something about how birds flew before they started thinking about how to make wings, and theirs were way better than Joint Attempt #1’s had been – they had used fabric that could be inflated with air to form ‘wings’ that were stiff enough to hold shape and an (unused) helmet to protect the head and neck of the flier. (Ok, so ‘they’ actually meant ‘Erestor’s dad’ as far as the making of the wings – which meant the wings had been properly constructed since it was a grownup doing them. Erestor’s dad hadn’t realized what they’d maneuvered him into making, not that ignorance had been accepted as an excuse when Uncle Butthead chewed him out for it afterward.) They’d even made an attempt at safety precautions beyond the helmet, putting a rope harness onto Amras before he tried to fly.

Once he’d been less upset with them, Uncle Butthead had helpfully chalked an outline of a young elf where Amras had hit the house as a reminder to future generations of the House of Fëanor about the dangers of trying to fly. Gramma Nerdanel said it had taken three years for Amras to stop being cranky about it. (She had been the one to tell Tindomiel that story, at a family luncheon at the palace, while Grandmother tried to act like she wasn’t embarrassed or defensive about the whole thing. It had been _awesome_.)

All this was why when Tindomiel had casually mentioned flying one day, Anairon’s puzzled response had been that elves couldn’t fly – and then, because he did know she was peredhel, adding that he was pretty sure that went for Men too.

\---

“Pfft,” Tindomiel snorted. “First off, I’m an elf. Remember, I got to _choose_ , and I chose ‘Elf’. That’s how I’m allowed to be here in the first place. If I had picked ‘Man’, I’d have had to stay in Ennor with Arwen.”

“Ok, fine,” Anairon hastily agreed. “That makes it simple. Elves can’t fly.”

Tindomiel rolled her eyes.

“Sure they can, if they do it right. So can Men. The ones in California did it all the time.”

Anairon peered at her suspiciously. She still caught him out with jokes delivered with a straight face on occasion, and he couldn’t tell if this was one of those times.

“You’re joking, right?” he asked uncertainly. “Stars of Varda, you’re _not_.”

“I’m completely serious. They had machines called _airplanes_ that could fly. People used them to travel long distances quickly. Like, we could have probably made the trip from Ennor to Aman in a day or two by plane if we’d had one.”

And if there had been actual jet fuel for it, but seeing as even the airplane part had been unlikely…

Anairon’s eyes were huge.

“That’s… amazing,” he finally managed. “But we can’t do that. Machines like that must be insanely complicated. We can’t build one of those without being noticed.”

Anairon himself tended more to the scholarly than the craftsman, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have some idea what he was talking about. He might be the youngest and most sheltered of them, but he was still a prince of the Noldor.

“No,” Tindomiel said slowly. “You’re right. I know a little about airplanes, but not enough to make one. But we _could_ probably manage one of the for fun things. Hang gliders can’t be that hard to do. That’s just a big frame with lightweight material stretched over it. We could build those for ourselves.”

Poor Anairon, caught off balance by this other form of flight he’d had no way to know about, could see the danger but no way to head it off.

“How?” Anairon protested, trying to stall until he could think of a better argument. “Even if we do manage to make one without anyone realizing what we're doing, there’s no way we could get it anywhere from here where we could use it without being noticed. And there’s no way my parents are about to let either of us try to fly.”

_Or any of your grandparents_ , Tindomiel knew he was thinking.

She sighed.

It was true. She had way more protective relatives here than she’d had in Imladris. Of course, in Imladris, she’d have had Anariel to help, because even if her older sister didn’t know much about the principles of aerodynamics, she had actually been on airplanes, not to mention gone hang gliding once, and definitely didn’t have the ‘elves can’t fly’ hangup everyone here did.

They’d never get away with it in Tirion.

Wait, they’d never get away with it in _Tirion_ …

\---

Tindomiel grinned.

“I’m sure,” she soothed Anairon. “Look, we tested out the model, didn’t we?”

If the Wright Brothers had been able to manage a wind tunnel in like 1900 when there was no electricity to power it, she’d seen no reason they couldn’t rig something up. She didn’t know how the Wrights had driven the air flow, but she knew they’d run a bicycle shop, so she’d worked from there. It was kind of a shame she couldn't tell anyone about it, because she's pretty sure the Noldor relatives would be proud of her work - once they got over being horrified about the end goal, anyway.

It was probably pretty weak by the standards of California Earth – she’s pretty sure anyone at JPL would have laughed their ass off had they seen her pedal-powered, hand-made-fan blown wind tunnel in the vacant palace workshop in Alqualondë Grandmother’s grandparents had been happy to let her use, but it worked enough for what she wanted.

At least, it did if she’d gotten the math right. She’d better have gotten it right. She’s pretty sure her reasoning about the scaling is correct…  (If she’s wrong, it’s going to be no consolation whatsoever that Anairon missed it too when he double checked her.)

“Yes,” Anairon replied with slightly more certainty. “It kept the model elf aloft in pretty weak ‘wind’.”

“Right,” Tindomiel agreed cheerfully. “Which means these full scale versions will hold us. And if they don’t, we just undo the safety catches when we get low enough and drop into the water, because even if we fall instead of fly, we aren’t going to fall very fast with something that’ll cause as much drag as these.”

She’s actually proud of the gliders they’ve built. Elven fabrics are more impressive than even quite a few of the high-performance California ones had been, so finding a sturdy, super light one to cover the lightweight wood frames had been no problem - especially given that the people of Alqualondë had plenty of fabrics intended to harness the wind, albeit for slightly different purposes.

Her only regret is that they haven’t showed them off to her grandparents yet, lest they be forbidden to use them. ‘Elves can’t fly’ might not be quite the deal in Alqualondë it is in Tirion, but she’s willing to bet Gramps Olwë and Gran Suyelirë know about Grandmother’s try at flying and how it went, and while they’re more laid-back than the Tirion grandparents, she wasn’t too sure they would ok this either.

Which is why she had waited until her grandparents were out for an afternoon sail before she and Anarion snuck up to the diving cliffs with their creations. (Her oldest siblings would have words for her, but she’s pretty sure Anariel would follow the ‘better to beg forgiveness than ask permission’ logic.)

They’d double checked that they’d unfolded the frames correctly, and that the fabric was secured properly so it wasn’t going to come loose mid-flight. The harnesses were made out of the same lightweight webbing used on Lindarin ships to secure far heavier loads than elves. And if worse came to worse, both Tindomiel and Anarion had been diving from the cliffs before, and could drop into the water confident that they wouldn’t injure themselves in the process.

“So you’re ready?” Tindomiel prompted hopefully.

Anairon sighed. He still wasn’t thrilled about this idea, but having gone along this far, there was no chance he was going to talk her out of it now.

“As ready as I’m going to be I guess,” he said resignedly.

Tindomiel grinned.

“Let’s do it, then!”

The two young elves connected the safety straps that would keep them connected to their gliders.

“Wow, you can already feel it’s going to take off,” Anairon marveled as the stiff breeze caught the sail of his glider.

“Yep,” Tindomiel agreed happily. “Here we go!”

They didn’t even really have to run so much as sort of walk off the cliff, and the wind did the rest. Once clear of the cliff, it become obvious they could glide for a while, so they kicked their feet up onto the lightweight beams Anairon had insisted would be more helpful than another set of straps to support them.

“I don’t believe it,” Anairon gasped in amazement when it was clear that they had well and truly beaten Amras ‘three whole seconds!’ record.  “We’re flying. Properly flying!”

“Isn’t it great?” Tindomiel called back. “And hey – this is something your brothers never did!”

“It is, isn’t it?” he marveled. “I’m the first of them to do something!”

His elation would have been contagious even if Tindomiel hadn’t been thorough enjoying her first experience of flight.

They soared out past several small boats, grinning and waving at the gaping sailors below.

It wasn’t until they’d been aloft for close to ten minute and the cliffs were receding behind them that Anarion spotted the flaw in their otherwise rather brilliant plan.

“Um, Tinwë?”

“Yeah?” she replied.

“How are we going to get back to shore?”

Under any other circumstances, he probably would have taken some satisfaction at the look of consternation on Tindomiel’s face – it wasn’t often she got caught in a situation she couldn’t talk her way out of.

“Crap,” she said eloquently.


End file.
